Linda said directly, “I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert
last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them
in Philadelphia.”
Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised
on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill
unrestrained wrath.
“I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing
here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope
you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them--I guess
not!”
“But I thought of going,” Linda replied. “It's only natural. After all,
you must see that he was my father.”
“A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault
I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of
him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked out of the
door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back.
I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the
kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent
speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries,” she managed to inject a
surprising amount of contempt into her pronouncement of that name. “What
it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:
“The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me,
and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid
way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat.”
“There must have been more,” Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire
to laugh.
“Not an inch,” her mother asserted. “Nothing, after a little, suited
him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips
tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what
you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew
where I was at. I'd come down in a matinée, the prettiest I could buy,
and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the
morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening
your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well
have slapped him direct.
“That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a
flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth but would
blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed
back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question
about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For all he knew, at a
place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead.”
She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted
frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason,
but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently,
the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father
sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly
take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process
completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever
was the matter with her--in the heartlessness so often laid to her
account--had been equally true of her father.
“You ought to know what to say to them,” Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, “or
I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing
or two not easy forgotten.”
Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she
made a vain effort to explain her attitude. “Of course, it was horrid
for you,” she said. “I can understand how you'd never never forgive him.
But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible,
since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this
before--it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I
am afraid I must see them.”
She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother
into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:
“I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming
all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both
of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't
care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would
make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm
married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being
better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I
did bring you into the world.”
“I am willing to agree with you,” Linda answered. “No one could be
sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't
it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at
that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it
wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't
any good, either.”
“Unnatural,” Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and
depressed, allowed her the last word.